Working With Judgment when caught in depression, anxiety or stress

Working with judgement helps us see the whole of things, not just what we like. With less judgment comes clarity and wisdom.

These days we get caught in judgment all the time.

Judgement can be especially strong for the person caught in depression, anxiety or stress.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see things clearly, without being caught in evaluations?

Judgment is a human characteristic, developed over many generations as our species learned to survive in the jungle. We needed to know what was safe, and what wasn’t. Who was safe, and who wasn’t. Judgment is deeply ingrained in our consciousness.

We can’t get rid of it, but we can learn to manage it.

We can train with Mindfulness to manage it.

If I walk into a beautiful garden full of beautiful bushes, trees and flowers i can admire it. What happens when I come across a dead part in the garden.Dead stuff is not so pretty, it’s uncomfortable, someone hasn’t done their job. i don’t want to focus on that, I’d rather just look at the roses. This is judgment in action.

Judgment is separating out what we do like and don’t like, and focusing on what we like.

The Mindfulness practice is to notice the judgment and allow our attention to take in the whole, the parts we like and those we don’t. With this training comes clarity, equanimity and wholesome actions.

It’s so common to dislike some things and like others. “Liking” something on facebook is a major successful, money-making marketing manipulation for facebook because it gets eyeballs engaged and sells advertising. Wouldn’t it be more significant to tell someone on facebook what it is that we like, and why? Truth is, facebook has promoted a superficial gesture and tried to make it feel genuine.

In the work of Mindfulness we intend go deeper than the surface, to understand life in a meaningful way, so we can live in a meaningful way.

So we can deeply enjoy our actions rather than skim the surface of awareness. In order to do this we must be able to see the whole of life, not just the shiny parts, and to do that we must learn to work with our tendency to judge, to discriminate, to focus only on what we like.

When we can see the whole garden, when we understand the whole of life, we can act with wisdom.

With the attached Mindfulness meditation we can decrease judgment and nurture a more useful awareness.